Dear Diary:
Jack arrived in my home quite startlingly on a recent night, with a sound like localized polite applause, wandering across my ceiling. I’d left the terrace door open, secure in being 150 feet off the ground, and that must have been his entry.
He was frenziedly terrified, landing on bookshelves and doorjambs, smacking into the living-room window, and the commotion made me somewhat panicked, too. I carefully chased him around for a half-hour, and finally he stopped on the windowsill, exhausted. Softly saying, “O.K., you’re O.K., it’ll be fine,†which, oddly, worked to calm him, I slowly enclosed him in both hands.
You may not have held a live sparrow (yet), but it’s an interesting experience. Fragile as a moth, maybe an ounce or two, heart beating 10 times a second and apparently paralyzed with fear. I carried Jack out to the terrace, put him down on a bench and watched him get his bearings for a few minutes, then fly off into the night.
I wonder what he made of it â€" that place high in the sky where night was day, the sky was solid rock, and a huge predator caught him and painlessly evicted him. Might be he’s founding a sparrow religion right now. For me, it was an odd close encounter with the natural world, while blogging idly in a New York City apartment.
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